Tuesday, January 5, 2010

I'm sure if you live in Dayton, you already know this - because everyone and their dog decided to post on facebook and twitter about it yesterday, no matter how uninformed or downright stupid it was. People started demanding that you not give your business to Renaissance Salon because Dr. Ervin, who owns the building where Pacchia was located, also owns RS's space.

The first thing you all need to get straight is, the owner of the building is NOT the same as the owner(s) of Pacchia. You don't need a real estate license to figure that out. Most business owners rent the space that they operate in. Yesterday, I saw more than one person post the following:

Please don't give your business to Renaissance Salon or anything that has to do with Dr. Irving. He just shut the doors to Pacchia and the Espresso Bar permanently. Meaning that all of those Great People are now out of work. Please keep them all in your thoughts as they try to adapt.

You people are out of your monkey ass minds! I'm sure the gals working at Renaissance really appreciate you trying to take food out of their mouths. Also, I don't know the guy, but I suspect Dr. Ervin would probably appreciate it if you got his name right before you dragged it through the mud.

The next thing everyone wanted to spout off about was not how much they'll miss the restaurant, but how much they'll miss the coffeehouse. Some alluded that they'd miss the business as a whole, but I'm willing to bet they purchased a latte occasionally, but never had a meal there. Granted, that little cafe was usually bustling with people - but it was a loss leader. Now where will all of those poor hipsters hang out and pretend to be smart, important, or brooding?

The thing that really got under my skin, though, is seeing all of the comments about what an epic blow this is to our local economy. Yes, it's a damn shame that a local landmark restaurant is closing and those folks have lost their jobs without notice. However, the things I was reading were completely helpless, sky-is-falling overreactions. "Dayton can't recover from this! Oregon will become a ghost town!" Did that happen when Blue Moon closed? Cafe Boulevard? Chin's? Sure, we miss them, but restaurants close everywhere, all the time. Each one is typically not a virtual Jenga block that will send the entire town's economy crashing down. Here's a list of eateries that have closed in Dayton over the last two years. I don't seem to recall any of them causing irreparable damage to their neighborhood's financial infrastructure - especially considering they're normally filled by another tenant in no time.

Besides, it's been evident for a while that fine dining isn't exactly suitable for the Gem City's economy (especially the Oregon District). Pacchia's owners came up with a plan to re-vamp the space with a new concept and more afforable scale, and then everyone fussed, "This is the end of fine dining in Dayton! Now it will just be another bar! 5th street is going to be completely classless now!" Make up your minds, people. First, you pissed and moaned because it was too pricey to have dinner there, and when they think about changing their image to lower their price scale, you think it will turn into a Maury Povich episode in the dining room.

Mark Fisher decided to post an article about the closing today, and while it did give more detail - it's also based on a press release from the building's owner, not Pacchia owners Steve Ramsey and Carla Carnahan. It also sort of pointed the finger directly at them as the reason the coffee shop closed along with the restaurant, which I'm not sure is the case. Also, leave it to DDN readers to make a few nonsense comments, then turn it into an argument about the Greene and the Dayton Mall area.

It seems that the City of Dayton is filled with an awful lot of doomsayers, leaving business owners damned if they do, damned if they don't. If all you can find to do is post on the DDN.com comments section about what's wrong with our fair city, you should probably just move somewhere else - where the dining is fancy, but God forbid - not too fancy.

On the factual and far-less-opinionated front, check back later for Dr. Ervin's press release regarding the closing. I should have it posted by this evening.

4
comments:

Mayor McHat
said...

I'd take that press release with an entire water-softener-sized bag o' salt, Ervin is unfortunately the major obstacle to anything realistic inhabiting that space. In addition to being overattached to keeping a white tablecloth in that space he kept the current ownership in limbo long enough that this came as a surprise to some people rather than the smooth(er) transition it otherwise could have been.

People around here prefer Olive Garden to some funny italian sounding named restaurant. Unlimited soup, salad and breadsticks baby! This is one of the reasons OG is packed every night and the restaurants downtown are not. The other is price point. A large national chain restaurant can negotiate better deals on ingredients and can often control costs more effectively. (Tangentially, while I liked Pacchia's mixed drinks, I'm on a budget and I can't afford 8 dollar martinis more than once ... in a blue moon). Sorry, but I worked at the Olive Garden as a server, and saw this regularly.

Besides, old people with money don't like going to the Oregon District at all. I know this because I took my grandparents to the Dublin Pub one time for dinner and all they did was bitch about how nasty and terrible the whole downtown area had become. Granted, they owned their own business downtown for over 50 years so I don't really know how to criticize them, but these are the kinds of people that would rather go to the mall (the people with money to spend).

As for the DDN, they are a worthless rag, and the people that comment on their website are in general just worthless trolls and troglodytes. Oh, and the DDN sucks, etc and so forth.

But please remember that the people of this town are in general stupid and close minded, like anywhere else. This applies also to the city's landlords. A lot of them are batshit crazy morons or simply slumlords.

And the ideologue/hipster set who just love the coffeehouse and the shops in the Oregon aren't usually wealthy enough as a group to support all those different places.

D. Greene, I am wholeheartedly with everything you addressed. Well said.

My boss is a bad combination of vegetarian and white bread/non-adventurous, so we end up there at least 50% of the time we have lunch meetings. That place makes me want to wretch. A while ago on Facebook, I posed to my friends that if they've ever began a thought with, "Olive Garden has the best..." that I would stop speaking to them.

In fact, everyone I work with has that white bread/non-adventurous thing going for them. I think it could be easily proven that most people over 40 living south of town in the burbs are absolutely *terrified* of the downtown area entirely. Under 40 and living in the burbs simply see downtown as a novelty.

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